Claire Milverton, CEO, 1Spatial
In our annual Leaders Forum, we ask experts to look ahead into 2023. Here we talk data with Claire Milverton.
Claire Milverton, CEO of 1Spatial, is passionate about building a collaborative culture within the company, and with customers and partners. She is a great believer in good data governance and building innovative solutions to capitalise on the high-quality data.
Is the geospatial sector in good shape to help solve the needs of the nation, e.g. climate change, renewable energy, infrastructure projects?
Yes, we believe that the Australian geospatial sector has actually thrived through the pandemic. Naturally, things have been done, and continue to be done, differently. However, the changes have helped to shape the nation on a variety of fronts, particularly when dealing with spatial information. We believe that society, government and industry have realised that spatial data, and the integrity of the data, is fundamental to ensuring sound decision-making.
What are the most important challenges facing the sector?
Data governance and quality undoubtedly remain two of the key challenges in any spatial project. With the demand for geospatial data continually increasing, the volume and update frequency requirements of spatial data increases too. This highlights the importance of mastering data quality and, ultimately, trust in the data. McKinsey reports that 30% of their total enterprise time was spent on non-value-added tasks because of poor data quality and availability. At 1Spatial we help organisations unlock the value of their data — including existing data — for improved analysis and critical decision-making.
Which technologies or innovations are going to make their mark in 2023?
We are already seeing AR, AI, 3D and ML gaining traction to automate the creation and visualisation of data. BIM is becoming more important in the construction industry and there is work being done to engage synergistically with GIS, while digital engineering and digital twins are gaining ground as emerging innovations for improved decision-making in the built environment. Combining all these innovations with GIS data and digital transformation is moving the market in an exciting direction.
What’s on your wish list for 2023?
There is a growing awareness across multiple industries that location data is a vital element in the delivery of more efficient, faster and safer services. Our clients often turn to us for solutions to meet the UN’s 17 Sustainability Goals. We work closely with the Open Geospatial Consortium and other like-minded organisations to ensure standardised data requirements are set and met and that easy access to location data is provided.
What are your customers and collaborators looking for in 2023?
Easy and fast access to high-quality data, and the ability to trust the data and know it is fit for purpose. We are continually being called upon to provide solutions for the ingestion, validation, correction and enhancement of data. We provide this through our platinum partnership with Safe Software and their FME suite of software, which, combined with our patented rules-based technology 1Integrate and its cloud deployment options, enable us to rapidly deploy location master data management solutions for our customers. An example of this is our Geospatial Data Validation Hub SaaS solution, which provides validation and an automatic logical correction service for the property development industry.
What are your company’s plans or priorities for 2023?
To continue to develop leading-edge software solutions to provide organisations the tools to take full advantage of their data. We believe in the Q-FAIR principles of Quality, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable data. Q-FAIR will ensure ongoing sources of truthful data. We are continually improving and expanding our software to ensure we are able to provide the state-of-the-art cloud-enabled solutions needed to ensure our clients are able to work with data that is trusted and fit for purpose.
We also believe that the demand for data quality solutions will continue to grow through user- friendly SaaS solutions. This has been shown through a number of SaaS solutions we have developed, such as the GDV Hub in Australia, our 1Streetworks application in the UK and the Next Generation 9-1-1 solution in the US. SaaS solutions are the most economical and fastest ways to provide data validation, correction and enhancement across a variety of sectors.
This article was first published in Issue 116 (Dec/Jan 2022-23) of Position magazine.
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